It's really hard to complain about my work week right now. As I write this blog, I'm sitting in the Congress Center in Düsseldorf, Germany looking out over the Rhine River. As an aside, in Germany it is the Rhein River, and I have a historical connection to this body of water. My surname, Amrhein, translates (loosely) to 'on the Rhein'. It does not take an expert in genealogy to conclude that I have ancestors who at one time or another lived very close to this important German waterway.

Okay, putting the family tree aside for a minute, there is a good reason that I am in Düsseldorf this week. The city, and specifically the Congress Center, is playing host to the IBM European WebSphere Technical Conference. I am here presenting sessions that include a WebSphere CloudBurst overview, a WebSphere CloudBurst hands-on lab, and an up-close look at one of our internal team's use of the appliance. I have done each of these sessions once so far, and attendance was great, audience participation high, and feedback forthcoming. I am hearing and seeing the same thing in other sessions, which is of course, ideal for us presenters.

Now, to focus in on WebSphere CloudBurst for a bit, it seems that I am hearing a recurring question this week from the mostly European audience: "Why is WebSphere CloudBurst delivered as an appliance?" I am sure that I addressed this question in a previous blog post, but I believe it bears revisiting. There are various reasons I could give for the appliance form factor, but I like to distill all of that down into three major reasons: Consumability, Performance, and Security.

From a solution consumability perspective, nothing beats the appliance approach. WebSphere CloudBurst is an integrated hardware and software solution that delivers a specific set of function. You do not have to install software, procure and maintain storage for resources on the appliance (images, patterns, scripts, etc.), and maintain software components over time. You simply drop the appliance in to your data center, perform a one-time initialization, hook it up to the network, and you are ready to start leveraging WebSphere CloudBurst to build out your private cloud. While there is definitely work to setup the cloud infrastructure that WebSphere CloudBurst deploys environments to, we can completely eliminate a significant portion of solution implementation lead time by delivering everything you need in the appliance.

The performance benefits of an appliance approach are a natural result of building an integrated hardware and software stack. Design and development teams provide optimizations in both the hardware and software based on the fact that both the hardware and software have intimate knowledge of each other's design. In other words, this is not a 'least common denominator' tuning approach. Rather, the integrated design leads to enhanced performance for the specific set of functionality provided by WebSphere CloudBurst.

Finally, appliances enable us to deliver a very hardened, secure device. We provide private key encryption of every resource stored on the appliance. That private key is unique to each appliance and cannot be modified. In addition, the physical casing is tamper-resistant. If someone removes the casing, a 'Get Smart' style kill switch puts the appliance in a dormant state. You must send the appliance to IBM so we can reset it before further use, thus providing an additional layer of physical protection on top of the encryption. These security features, plus more, like a shield that prevents anyone from executing code on the appliance, come right out of the box and require no end-user configuration activity. In this way, you can simply focus on leveraging the user security and access controls provided by WebSphere CloudBurst.

If you had any questions on the rationale behind the appliance form factor of WebSphere CloudBurst, I hope this helps. I am off for now... back to the conference and the wonderful city of Düsseldorf.

If you are going to install and use WebSphere CloudBurst in your own environment, it is very likely that you would want at least two appliances. Perhaps you want to have a standby appliance in case of a failure on the main appliance, or maybe you have different teams that are looking to utilize the appliance in different data centers. In any case, once you install multiple appliances there's another requirement that will pop up pretty quickly. Naturally you are going to want to share custom artifacts among the various WebSphere CloudBurst boxes.

When I say custom artifacts, namely I mean virtual images, patterns, and script packages. Script packages have been easy enough to share since WebSphere CloudBurst 1.0 because you can simply download the ZIP file from one appliance and upload it to another. However, there are some enhancements in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1 that make it easy to share both patterns and images among your different appliances.

As far as patterns go, there is a new script included in the samples directory of the WebSphere CloudBurst command line interface package called patternToPython.py. This script will transform a pattern you specify into a python script. The resulting python script can then be run against a different WebSphere CloudBurst (using the CLI), and the result is the pattern is created on the target appliance. You need to be sure that the artifacts that pattern references (script packages and virtual images) exist on the target appliance and have the exact same name as they do on the appliance from which the pattern was taken. There are no other caveats, and this new sample script makes it really simple to move patterns between appliances.

For virtual images, a new feature was added that allows you to export a virtual image from the WebSphere CloudBurst console. Simply select a virtual image, specify a remote machine (any machine with SCP enabled), and click a button to export the image as an OVA file. This OVA file can then be added to another WebSphere CloudBurst catalog using the normal process for adding virtual images. You can see this feature in action here.

Stay tuned for more information about some of the handy new features in WebSphere CloudBurst 1.1. We also should have a comprehensive look at the new release coming soon in a developerWorks article.